Gerd Kieffer-Døssing

Primary research areas

Gerd Kieffer-Døssing is doing research in Francophone West Africa, where she is particularly interested in people power and social movements, including their ability to influence politics and challenge the status quo.

Current research

Currently, Gerd is working on her PhD project '3rd wave Pan-Africanism: Digital activism, local protest, and geopolitical change in West Africa'.

West Africa is becoming increasingly unstable. Military coups have returned as antipathy towards former colonial master France is rising and still more states renew connections with Russia. 

The project explores the links between changing perceptions of geopolitical actors in the region and a rising 3rd wave Pan-Africanism, 3WPA – a transnational movement promoting a new decolonial order and calling to resistance against French neo-colonialism and Western imperialism.

Through digital ethnography, focused on the online activism of leading 3WPA-actors, and fieldwork in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire among Pan-African activists, the project explores how 3WPA circulates regionally through digital technologies and in which ways it affects local activist practices and perceptions.

The project contributes with new empirically rooted knowledge on the links between digital activism, local protest, and geopolitical changes in Africa and provides valuable insights into how new actors affect geopolitics in West Africa through digital means.

The PhD project is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, DFF, and began in 2023. DIIS is hosting the project, which is also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen.